Benny Andrews was a painter, writer, printmaker, sculptor, book illustrator and teacher. His work, like his background, was complex and multi-faceted. A storyteller at heart and self-described “people’s painter,” Andrews focused on figurative social commentary depicting the struggles, atrocities, and everyday occurrences in the world, but he was not satisfied to use art as a substitute for action. Benny Andrews was born on November 13, 1930, in Plainview, Georgia, a small farming community three miles from Madison. Andrews was one of 10 children in a family of sharecroppers; raised while it was still segregated in the rural south, he grew up desperately poor. His mother, Viola, instilled in her ten children the importance of education, religion, and freedom of expression; his father, George, a self-taught artist, fueled their creativity with his drawings and illustrations. Although the entire family worked in the cotton fields as sharecroppers, Viola Andrews was adamant that her children attend school. Andrews's attendance was sporadic because he went only when he wasn't needed in the fields or when it rained. After several years at Plainview Elementary School, Andrews walked to Madison to attend Burney Street High School, and in 1948 he was the first member of his family to graduate. Andrews enrolled in and studied at Georgia’s Fort Valley State College with a two-year scholarship awarded by the 4-H Club. The only art course offered was a single class in art appreciation, which Andrews took six times. By 1950, with the end of the scholarship money and poor grades, Andrews left school and enlisted in the U.S. Air Force. He served four years of military duty, which spanned the Korean War (1950-53), attaining the rank of staff sergeant before receiving an honorable discharge in 1954. Funding from the GI Bill enabled him to enroll at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Andrews arrived at the Art Institute of Chicago in the fall of 1954. His divergent aesthetic interests and the fact that he was one of only nine black students left him feeling alienated from the institution. His distinctive figurative style developed from his childhood habits. Andrews and his brother Raymond, who became a novelist, saved illustrations from newspapers, magazines, and comic books, which Andrews then copied. With an economy of lines and elongated figures, he created original drawings based on the observed gestures and expressions of those around him or from memories.
He was inspired by artwork at the Art Institute of Chicago and by the people he saw on the streets and in the jazz clubs. During this period, Andrews experimented with collage to incorporate a three-dimensional element in a two-dimensional medium, having the effort to create rawness and tension within his work. His work took on a singular style, which defies categorization but shows the influences of the dominant movements of the 1950s, abstract expressionism and surrealism, as well as the dominant movements of the 1930s and early 1940s, social realism and the American scene. His work had been rejected from every art show at the institute, including the veterans' exhibition, which had a single exhibition requirement, military service. Boris Mango and Jack Levine were the people at the Institute who inspired him to continue to make art in his own way. During his years at art school, Andrews earned money as an illustrator for record companies, creating covers for Duke Ellington and other top musicians. Blue Note, which gained recognition for its innovative cover designs, bought his work regularly. Andrews also drew advertising illustrations for various theater companies in Chicago. Andrews married Mary Ellen Smith, a photographer, in 1957. In 1958, he completed his bachelor of fine arts degree and the couple promptly moved to New York City.
Within his first six years of residence in New York, Andrews became an established artist. He moved into a three-room tenement on Suffolk Street and became part of the art scene. His wife took an office job to support the family, while Andrews stayed at home, took care of the children, and painted; they had two sons, Christopher and Thomas, and a daughter, Julia. He met other practicing artists; his friends included the artists Red Grooms, Bob Thompson, Lester Johnson, Mimi Gross and the Soyer brothers. Andrews sketched the natives of the Lower East Side in nearby cafes and jazz clubs. Andrews began his own style of painting in the 1960s when the collage movement started to flourish; he was using geometrical forms in his art, and abstract expressionism became a personal movement for him. Although he had seen poverty in Georgia and Chicago, life in lower Manhattan struck him as particularly harsh. In response he developed a “rough collage” technique that combined rugged scraps of paper and cloth with paint on canvas. Andrews had mastered this technique, and in 1962, Bella Fishko invited Andrews to become a member of the Forum Gallery, which gave him his first solo exhibition in the city. Reviewed favorably in The New York Times, it was during this period that he began to produce collages, which some critics consider his strongest work. Additional solo exhibitions followed in 1964 and 1966, and Andrews’s work was included in shows at the Philadelphia Academy of Art and the National Institute of Arts in New York. Between 1960 and 1970, he had eleven solo shows at the Paul Kessler Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and three at the Forum Gallery in New York City.
During the 1960s and 1970s Andrews was also busy organizing a crusade on behalf of the black artist. He was a cofounder of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, leading both protests and negotiations in order to bring awareness and inclusion of work by minority and women artists into major collections and exhibitions. In 1969, the group held a demonstration against the exhibit “Harlem on My Mind” at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. No black scholars or historians had participated in organizing the show, which Andrews saw as “a continuation of the paternalistic approach” to understanding African American culture. The coalition’s next target was the Whitney Museum of American Art, also based in New York City. The museum’s permanent collection contained only ten works by black artists, and its biennial exhibitions rarely included works by African Americans or women. The museum’s curators agreed to hold an exhibition titled “Contemporary Black Artists in America,” but the coalition objected to the way it was handled and decided to boycott the show. Of the 75 artists scheduled to participate in the exhibition, 15 withdrew in sympathy with the boycott. In 1971, 50 black artists participated in the show “Rebuttal to the Whitney Museum Exhibition” at the Acts of Art Galleries in New York. Two years later, Andrews curated an exhibition of work by black artists, titled “Blacks: USA: 1973” at the New York Cultural Center. The show was what should have been mounted at the Whitney, Andrews asserted.
Andrews continued to paint, exhibit, travel, write, and teach into his seventies. During his lifetime, he lectured extensively at colleges and universities throughout the United States, was a visiting critic at such prestigious institutions as Yale University, and received artist’s residency fellowships as well as grants and other fellowships from a number of institutions.
In 1965, with funding from a John Hay Whitney fellowship, Andrews traveled to Georgia and began working on his Autobiographical Series. His Autobiographical Series of paintings was inspired by this trip, and it established his affinity for producing several works unified by a theme. Subsequent series include Bicentennial, Women I've Known, Completing the Circle, Southland, America, Cruelty and Sorrows, Revival, Music, Langston Hughes, and The Migrants. In 1968, he began a career at Queens College, City University of New York, where he was part of the college’s SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) program, designed to help students from underserved areas prepare for college. In 1971, the art classes Andrews had been teaching at the Manhattan Detention Complex became the cornerstone of a major prison art program initiated under the auspices of the BECC that expanded across the country. In 1976, he became the art coordinator for the Inner City Roundtable of Youths (ICRY), an organization founded in 1975 and comprised of gang members in the New York metropolitan area who seek to combat youth violence by strengthening urban communities. In 1977, Andrews was included in the Tenth International Print Biennial Exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan, where he also received the Ohara Museum Prize. From 1982 to 1984, Andrews held the position of visual arts director at the National Endowment for the Arts. During his tenure, he established many outreach programs throughout the country. In 1997, Andrews became a member of the National Academy of Design. In 1986, Andrews married artist Nene Humphrey, having divorced his first wife ten years earlier. In 2002, the Benny Andrews Foundation was established by her to help emerging artists gain greater recognition and to encourage artists to donate their work to historically black museums. Shortly before his death in 2006, Andrews was working on an art project in the Gulf Coast with children displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
Benny Andrews was a figural painter in the expressionist style who painted a diverse range of themes of suffering and injustice. The work of Benny Andrews is narrative and passionate and always carries a message. Collage has always been a sustaining umbilical medium for the artist and it is somewhere between surrealism and social realism that his work resides. A master draftsman, Andrews imbues his line drawings with a rare vitality and fervor. Andrews wanted to express himself differently from other artists in order to create his own unique individuality. His works are delicate, subtle, and intimate. Whatever the medium, they are always linear, narrative, and abstract. He draws from his past private life in Georgia and his social life in New York. The inclusion of rugged surfaces, found scraps of papers, cloth, and built-up sections gives the paintings a "surreal reality" in relation to the past and present of a person. His collages are at times illusionary and representational. Christian imagery is prevalent in his work, and many of his collages and paintings have referred to the southern black life, where there was no interference with religion. A social realist, Andrews believes that art elevates people, glorifies people's pasts, and builds self-pride. While Andrews struggled for recognition for himself as an artist, for other African American artists, and for African American culture in general, fame has never been his primary goal. His work appears in the collections of more than 20 museums nationwide. These include the Detroit Institute of Art, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Philadelphia Academy of Art.